Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared

Kafka, Franz
Gregory, Horace
Hofmann, Michael

Paperback

HumorScience FictionClassic Fiction

Publisher Price: $13.95

ISBN10: 0811215695
ISBN13: 9780811215695
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: May 17 2004
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.66 Width: 5.22 Depth: 8.01
Language: English
Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, necessarily endless. Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, a poor boy of seventeen, has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated including the book's original ending.

The San Francisco Chronicle said Hofmann's sleek translation does a wonderful job and The New York Times concurred: Anything by Kafka is worth reading again, especially in the hands of such a gifted translator as Hofmann.

5 different editions

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